Design Indaba 2013 – Dezeenhttps://www.dezeen.com
architecture and design magazineSat, 10 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.1"We're trying to get design out of the way"https://www.dezeen.com/2013/04/09/were-trying-to-get-design-out-of-the-way/
https://www.dezeen.com/2013/04/09/were-trying-to-get-design-out-of-the-way/#commentsTue, 09 Apr 2013 09:45:48 +0000http://admin.dezeen.com/?p=306483Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our final movie from Design Indaba in Cape Town, Ben Terrett, head of design at Government Digital Service, explains the design principles behind the new Gov.uk website, which combines all the UK Government's websites into a single site. Update: this interview is featured in Dezeen Book of Interviews, which is

"There were thousands of websites, and we folded them into Gov.uk to make just one," says Terrett. "The reason to do that really is to ensure that the user doesn't have to understand government to find something out. They just go to one place and it's there. They don't have to know which department has what information."

Terrett explains that the core idea behind it was to make it as simple and intuitive as possible for the user. "People only go onto government websites once or twice a year to find out a particular thing," he says. "So people shouldn't spend time relearning how to use it. The core of all our work is focussing on user need."

Terrett sought advice from Margaret Calvert, the graphic designer who, along with Jock Kinneir, designed the UK's road signs, which have been imitated around the world. Terrett cites her work as one of the iconic pieces of British design he took inspiration from: "There is this huge catalogue or canon of projects that have got this fantastic heritage of this public sector sort of design work," he says, also citing the London Underground tube map and Joseph Bazalgette's sewer network. "The more you look at it the more they were trying to do a very similar sort of thing to what we're doing."

The Gov.uk site only uses a single font and has been stripped of any graphical flourishes. "Something we're trying to do in particular is let design get out of the way and let the user get to what they want," Terrett says. "You shouldn't come to the website and go: 'wow, look at the graphic design'. We haven't yet achieved that in most web interfaces; they're still getting in the way [and] you can see the graphic design everywhere. We need to get past that."

Terrett believes that, with new technology like Google Glass simplifying or even removing the user interface altogether, websites will eventually catch up. "Google Glass and other things that we don't know about yet will prompt people to think harder and work harder on that stuff," he says. "But there's a long way to go and I think it's a fascinating challenge, a really exciting challenge."

]]>https://www.dezeen.com/2013/04/09/were-trying-to-get-design-out-of-the-way/feed/1"We've been designing biology for 10,000 years"https://www.dezeen.com/2013/04/08/weve-been-designing-biology-for-10000-years/
https://www.dezeen.com/2013/04/08/weve-been-designing-biology-for-10000-years/#commentsMon, 08 Apr 2013 07:00:29 +0000http://admin.dezeen.com/?p=305936Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our next movie from Design Indaba in Cape Town, designer Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg discusses synthetic biology - a new field of science that could see designers creating artificial lifeforms. For example, bacteria could one day be developed to excrete brightly coloured pigments when they detect disease inside your body, alerting

For example, bacteria could one day be developed to excrete brightly coloured pigments when they detect disease inside your body, alerting you via vividly coloured poo.

Synthetic biology is a development of the age-old practice of selective breeding, Ginsberg explains: "We've been designing biology for 10,000 years or more," she says. "Every crop, or your pet dog - it has all been designed in a way. It's been iterated and iterated by human decisions into the thing that we want. The idea behind synthetic biology is that you can get much more control and start moving things across living kingdoms that haven't interacted at a genetic level before."

Ginsberg gives the example of E.chromi, a project she worked on with fellow designer James King and undergraduate students at Cambridge University, which won the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition in 2009. "It's a competition where thousands of students from around the world get together to design a bacteria that does something cool," she explains. "We were working with students at Cambridge who were designing bacteria that produce different coloured pigments."

As part of the project, Ginsberg and her team considered the possible future applications and implications of their work. "We imagined that in about 2039 it would become culturally acceptable to drink a Yakult-type yoghurt laced with E.chromi bacteria that would start to detect diseases in your gut," she says. "If you had a disease they'd start producing a corresponding coloured pigment. So coloured poo is the thing that everyone has taken from this project, as a new kind of interface for biological computing."

Not content to simply present the project as a series of diagrams, Ginsberg and King created a mock-up of what the imagined excrement might look like. "We wanted to challenge the scientists and engineers who are actually inventing the technology with what we thought was an interesting aesthetic response," She explains. "They're representing it as cogs and machines, but this is biology. We shouldn't be shy or coy about talking about what's unique about this technology."

]]>https://www.dezeen.com/2013/04/08/weve-been-designing-biology-for-10000-years/feed/1"Digital technology will continue to disappear"https://www.dezeen.com/2013/04/06/digital-technology-will-continue-to-disappear/
https://www.dezeen.com/2013/04/06/digital-technology-will-continue-to-disappear/#commentsSat, 06 Apr 2013 07:00:38 +0000http://admin.dezeen.com/?p=305167Dezeen and MINI World Tour: Google Creative Lab creative director Alexander Chen explains how he created a digital string you can pluck like a viola and discusses Google Glass and the future of user interface design in this movie we filmed at Design Indaba in Cape Town last month. Chen presented a number of his personal

Chen presented a number of his personal projects at Design Indaba, which involve novel ways of making music on a computer. "I grew up playing the viola and I've always written and recorded my own music," he explains. "I was learning that alongside computer programming and visual design [so] I always wanted to combine the things together."

For a project called Mta.me, Chen created a virtual stringed instrument based on the New York subway system (above). "I'd just moved to New York and I started to think 'what if the lines on the subway map could be a musical instrument?'" he says.

In Chen's map, the different subway routes become strings, which vibrate at different frequencies based on their length. Chen then animated the map so that the strings are plucked by other subway lines that intersect them. "I took it one step further," he says. "I looked up the subway schedule and using computer code had the subway performing itself."

He believes that wearable technology like Google Glass demonstrates how digital technology in future will be more integrated into our lives. "Technology continues to disappear more and more," he says. "I don't know if I want to make any strong predictions, but I hope that technology disappears more and more from my life and you forget that you're using it all the time instead of feeling like you're burdened [by it].

"I hope it becomes more like the water running in our house and the electricity running through our buildings: we use it when we need it and then we forget about it for the rest of the day and just enjoy being people."

]]>https://www.dezeen.com/2013/04/06/digital-technology-will-continue-to-disappear/feed/6"I think we were the first in history to motion-capture our own sperm"https://www.dezeen.com/2013/04/01/i-think-we-were-the-first-in-history-to-motion-capture-our-own-sperm/
https://www.dezeen.com/2013/04/01/i-think-we-were-the-first-in-history-to-motion-capture-our-own-sperm/#commentsMon, 01 Apr 2013 09:00:37 +0000http://admin.dezeen.com/?p=303598Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in the second part of our interview at Design Indaba in Cape Town, Masashi Kawamura, partner at creative agency PARTY, explains the process behind a television commercial he made featuring dancing sperm. Kawamura describes how he was approached by a Japanese music television company called Space Shower TV to produce

]]>Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in the second part of our interview at Design Indaba in Cape Town, Masashi Kawamura, partner at creative agency PARTY, explains the process behind a television commercial he made featuring dancing sperm.

Kawamura describes how he was approached by a Japanese music television company called Space Shower TV to produce a commercial for their Music Saves Tomorrow campaign, a response to the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit the country in 2011. "There were a couple of other directors working on it and they were doing very serious, dramatic, emotional commercials," Kawamura explains. "But I wanted to do something more fun, just to bring back the smiles to the people."

All Kawamura had to work with was the Music Saves Tomorrow tagline. "For me, 'tomorrow' meant the next generation and the children, but I didn't want to show kids in a TV commercial," he says. "So I was thinking if there was any other way to visualise these seeds of tomorrow and I thought, well, what if I went a step further and not show kids but show sperm?"

In the 60-second commercial that Kawamura came up with, animated sperm dance in formation to music. Kawamura describes the unusual lengths he and his team went to to create it. "We looked around and there was an all-male crew, so we decided to collect our sperm and bring it to a bio lab," he says. "We scanned it and motion-captured our sperm and used that data to create the animations. I think nobody else has done that in history."

]]>https://www.dezeen.com/2013/04/01/i-think-we-were-the-first-in-history-to-motion-capture-our-own-sperm/feed/1"We wanted to bring the family portrait into the next century"https://www.dezeen.com/2013/03/31/we-wanted-to-bring-the-family-portrait-to-the-next-century/
https://www.dezeen.com/2013/03/31/we-wanted-to-bring-the-family-portrait-to-the-next-century/#commentsSun, 31 Mar 2013 09:00:38 +0000http://admin.dezeen.com/?p=303587Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in latest video from Design Indaba in Cape Town, Masashi Kawamura of Japanese creative agency PARTY talks about the pop-up 3D photo booth he ran in Tokyo last year. The Omote 3D Shashinkan project, which we featured on Dezeen last year, gave customers the opportunity to buy a 3D-printed model of

The Omote 3D Shashinkan project, which we featured on Dezeen last year, gave customers the opportunity to buy a 3D-printed model of themselves or their family. "We wanted to find a new way to innovate the form of the family portrait and bring it to the next century," Kawamura explains. "What happens is, when you come, we take a full 3D scan [of your body] using our portable scanners. People could actually bring back home their miniature figurines, instead of a 2D portrait that you normally get."

PARTY used a colour 3D printer to produce the detailed models, which ranged from 10cm to 20cm high, but Kawamura believes there is still a lot of room for the technology to improve. "3D printing for me is a very exciting medium to play around with, but I think it's still in a very early phase of development," he says. "After doing this project we've learnt a lot of technical difficulties and a lot of things that could be done better in terms of technologies and also the materials that we use."

But Kawamura is optimistic about the future possibilities of 3D printing. "Everything, I think, will get better in the next year or two; there'll be significant improvements," he says. "Just the idea that anyone could manufacture their own product is very, very interesting."